


A Drop of Water in the Void

by for_t2



Category: Original Work
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alien Gender/Sexuality, Anthropology, Evolution, Gen, Gender Identity, I Don't Even Know, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Languages, Philosophy, Questioning, Science Fiction, The Void, Virus, Water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25358488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/for_t2/pseuds/for_t2
Summary: Five times a xenoanthropologist asked aliens about gender, and one time an alien asked back
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	A Drop of Water in the Void

**1**

It is said that the Void-Swimmers, as they’ve been called, were the tragic remnants of an attempt at ascension gone wrong. A species that had tried to surpass the physical, to live immortally as beings of pure energy, and had failed, leaving them doomed to wander the great vacuum of outer space forever as something in between.

Which, of course, meant that the first human contact had been an absolute terror, the mangled form of a Void-Swimmer slipping through the metal hull of a freighter ship in the dead of interstellar space.

And ever since, the relationship between them and humanity had been marked by one-sided curiosity, by many questions and not a lot of answers. It isn’t known where the Void-Swimmers came from, or how long they’ve been around, or even how many of them they are. What is known is that they are a reclusive species, with only a handful of known encounters being recorded every year, and that their numbers are, unfortunately, dwindling.

“We have nothing resembling your notion of gender.”

But now, Nel thought, they might be able to add something else to that list. “Did you ever?”

“It is forgotten.”

One of the problems with xenoanthropology, of course, was translation. Not just between languages, but between concepts, between ways of sentient thought themselves. “Completely forgotten?”

“Yes.”

Nel rested their head against the fabric of the ship’s sofa, the ventilation humming constantly in the background with the engines. “Huh.”

“We…” The lone Void-Swimmer started and then stopped for so long that Nel thought they might’ve lost them. “Water.”

“Water?”

“We feel a vestige. We once lived in water. It was a part of us. It flowed through us. It gave us life. It was the wellspring of passion. We are not sure if that corresponds to your gender, but it is now gone. And it has been so long.”

Nel leaned forward. “A single, unitary gender?”

“Maybe that is all that is left.” The Void-Swimmer began to drift back outwards, fading into the shadows. “A drop of water lost in the void.”

**2**

“It is the light.”

“That’s how you communicate, isn’t it?” Nel breathed steadily through their helmet, floating in the middle depths of the Ceoeler oceans, the swarm of aliens gathering around them.

“We each have a light. It signals our role, how we build the swarm, how we hunt.”

Nel watched the cell photolayers of the Ceoeler light up around them, one by one, a whole spectrum of colours shining brightly through the oceans. It was well known that they were a tight-knit species with elaborate social structures, living in some of the most inhospitable parts of their planets’ oceans. “How do you decide which light is yours?”

“The swarm needs.”

“It can change?”

“The swarm needs.”

“How do you know what the swarm needs?”

The Ceoeler stared at them for a long moment. “The swarm needs. Does your swarm not hunt?”

“We…” The guidelines for the study of the Ceoeler always stressed the need for caution. For safety. If only the broad outlines of Ceoeler swarm society was documented, it was because more than one researcher had descended into the ocean and never came back. “We hunt.”

The swarm swam closer, around them, lights flashing on and off in patterns too fast for Nel to keep up with. “Show us.”

**3**

“It is where one -- --- next --” 

“Sorry.” Nel adjusted the transmitter around the snaking red filaments of the Ommak planet’s neural web. The first scientists had called them veins, unnaturally still in the cold rocks of the planet who had long ago lost most of its atmosphere. “Could you repeat that?”

“It is where one begins and the next ends.”

It took almost a decade of collecting samples before one scientist realised that those veins that covered most of the planet’s surface were alive, and a decade after that to realise that they were sentient, and another decade after that to treat them like it. “There’s more than one of you?”

And it took decades after that to draw up proper diplomatic channels. To figure out a way to communicate with a species whose sentience moved at what seemed like a glacial pace (or, maybe it was human sentience that moved at a superheated pace). “There is just the one, and the ones within the one, and the connections within the one.”

“And that’s what you’d call gender?”

“Is that not what you call gender?”

Nel chuckled, not that the web could hear. “Are there different types of connections?”

“There is only one.” Before Nel could type anything else in, the web spoke again. “But some ones have more connections to the one. And the ones where the one ends are… tragic.”

“So,” Nel chuckled again. “Would you say your gender is a number?”

“A number.” Even by the standards of the web, the reply took a long time to come. “Yes. That sounds right.”

**4**

The planet Ikalā was maybe the least talked about and the most talked about planet among human society. The least in the eyes of common gossip, the planet’s sentient inhabitants less alien, less mysterious than any other of the species yet encountered, but the most in the eyes of common academia, the inhabitants’ remarkable similitude to something approaching a mammal making them easy to study.

Of course, the Pahāṛa felt the same way about humanity.

“You have read the literature, of course?” The Pahāṛa professor (to use a human term for an alien profession) glanced at Nel with something approaching pretention.

“Well, yes,” Nel tried not to stammer. “Of course. But I was hoping to hear it from you directly. Personal interviews are always—”

“I’m not sure what’s left for me to say.” The Ikalāan evolutionary history was extensively documented – a planet orbiting around a rogue, barely burning dwarf, whose vegetation had grown tall and dense, grasping at every little bit of sunlight it could reach, and in between the leaves (to use a human term for an alien organism), the Pahāṛa, experts at glimpsing the patterns in the darkness.

“Well, I was hoping—” 

“I do find humans always have trouble grasping the spiritual aspect of what you’d call gender.” First contact had been an interesting affair. An affair that would most accurately be described as the Pahāṛa discovering humanity, filing it away as a trivial scientific curiosity, and then being entirely nonplussed when humanity discovered them a few years later. It was an affair that still caused diplomatic incidents.

“You do?”

“I find that you don’t have the same… intimate relationship with the stars as we do.” The Pahāṛa professor nodded (to use a human term for an alien gesture) at the mural covering the roof – the murals that covered the roofs of every Pahāṛa shelter. “You look so much like us, but you act so much more like the Ceoeler, with your strict spirituality and your strict hierarchies.” The professor made a sound that was the equivalent of a laugh. “Some of us have like to call you that, you know? The strict apes.”

“The what now?”

“Your gender should be something that connects you to the universe, that connects to your future, wouldn’t you say?” As the professor went on, Nel tried to catalogue any human nicknames for the Pahāṛa they could remember (and there were a lot of them). “That connects the inside to the outside, so to speak.”

“Uh…”

The professor laughed again. “You really should read the literature.”

**5**

The Sentvi, as they were called since they were a species with no language of their own, were maybe the most feared not only of all the sentient species yet discovered, but of all species yet discovered. The mere suspicion of a Sentvi outbreak had been enough to crash several planets’ economies, to have those planets utterly cut off from any alliance of human planets.

The life cycle of the Sentvi came in three stages: the first was the unliving stage, the clusters of virus particles; the second was the living stage, when several of the viruses entered the body and began infecting the body’s cells; and the third was the sentient stage, when the memory capsids reached the central nervous system and took over.

The question of how the Sentvi evolved was a great unknown. A handful of the viruses in the clusters were able to cause deadly infections on their own, but the vast majority did absolutely nothing by themselves, not even capable of attaching to the most common of cellular receptors. In fact, many doubted that such a highly specialised, highly sophisticated symbiosis could even evolve on its own – one leading theory said the Sentvi were a result of an experiment into the use of DNA as memory storage gone horribly wrong (or maybe horribly right).

Whichever was the case, the Sentvi were the stuff of horror holos, and, even behind airlocked glass, nestled inside a biosafety suit, it took everything Nel had not to run.

“I’ve been reading the pamphlets your doctors leave around. The way you classify us into sexes.” The Sentvi, once a human named Tracy grinned from the other side of the airlock. “The memory-carrier sex, the immune suppressor sex, the protein-manufacturer sex, and so on and so forth.”

“And?”

“I think you don’t understand us at all.”

Nel tried to calm their breathing, tried to ignore the sweaty heat of the biosafety suit. “How so?”

“It’s funny, how you fear us, because we’re a lot closer to each other than you think.” One of the biggest debates among politicians was how to control a Sentvi outbreak. Was it ethical to eliminate a sentient disease? Especially one that had been proven to incorporate some human memories into their genome? “We both depend on our binary.”

“Do we?”

The Sentvi nodded. Held up a hand of full of fingers. “You classify us into all these types, but at the end of the day, there’s only two that matter.”

“Which ones?”

“To use your terms,” The Sentvi closed their fingers one by one until only two were left. “Those who have been infected, and those who have yet to be infected.”

**+1**

“It has been long since I have talked this much.”

Nel smiled at the Void-Swimmer, the printed-out mess that was the nineteenth draft of their thesis sprawled out on across the ship’s common room, every page marked red with yet more edits. “Is that a bad thing?”

“It is not.” The Void-Swimmer couldn’t drink, but Nel had made them a mug of hot chocolate anyways, and they had seemed to appreciate that. “But a chapter is missing.”

“What?” Nel swore under their breath. Panicked as they immediately started digging through the pages. “Where?”

“It has yet to be written.”

“Oh.” Nel sighed in relief. Took a long gulp of their hot chocolate to bring the adrenaline back down. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“It is maybe not a simple question.”

Nel snorted at that thought – if any of it had been a simple question, there wouldn’t be nineteen drafts (and counting). “Yeah?”

“What is yours?”

“It…” Nel trailed off. They hadn’t included a chapter on human gender in the thesis. “Well, our dominant philosophy is that we are a species divided. There is the passive gender, who carries the young, who nurtures, who keeps the home, and there is the active gender, who impregnates, who protects, and who fights for the home.”

“You say the home dominates, yet you explore the void.”

“Obviously, we have more philosophies, and it’s not really that dominant anymore, but…” Nel was a xenoanthropologist, not a homoanthropologist. “It’s a really long story.”

“Yet you ask us to tell you a short story.”

Nel chuckled. “We don’t like it when things get complicated. We prefer to work with the things that fall into the strict categories we create.” Nel was definitely going to have to add another chapter to the thesis. “I guess you could say we’re a simple species.”

“Yet you are an individual.” The Void-Swimmer circled through the ship’s hull, around and closer to Nel. “Is that your philosophy?”

“I…” No. There was a lot of things Nel wasn’t sure about, but this was one. “I wouldn’t say so.”

“Then what is your gender?”

Nel thought about it, about how they had discovered how, how they tried to communicate it, how it felt in a crowd, how it felt all alone, how… how they could start from that drop of water in the void and make it flow into something they could understand. If they even could. “Well…” Nel considered it a moment longer. Laughed. “Fuck if I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> What even is gender anyways?


End file.
